The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Sergei Prokofiev · a ballet in four acts, Op. 64, on a scenario after Shakespeare by Sergei Radlov, Adrian Piotrovsky, Leonid Lavrovsky and the composer · the full score in the standard performing version that descends from the Kirov staging of 1940, with the tragic ending · scored as one work
Mode
Full-length narrative ballet as continuous symphonic drama, carried by leading themes; set dances, fights, pas de deux and processions in one idiom
Mythos
Love and death made one music; the feud as a ritual the city performs; a girl at play becoming a woman who has chosen
Phase
Four acts: the square and the Capulet ball, ending at the balcony; the town at play and the fights; Juliet’s room, the friar and the morning of the wedding to Paris; a short epilogue of the funeral and the deaths
Presentation
Concert music; a ballet score for large orchestra, with no word sung or spoken; the titles of the numbers are its only words
Register
From the Prince’s dissonant chords and the heavy pomp of the knights to the Nurse’s gait, a friar’s chorale and a girl’s running scales
Scale
Two houses, a prince, a friar and a nurse; the city at a ball, in the street and at a festival; a full evening
Governing Proposition
Two houses of Verona carry their feud through the streets and into a ball, and at the ball a girl still running at play meets a young man of the other house; the score follows them out of the dance of the city into a balcony, a cell and a tomb. The wager of the work is that a tragedy without words can be told as motion, each person a way of moving set to music, and that love can be heard as a withdrawal from the dance everyone else is dancing.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The ballet opens on a square in Verona, and on the town at its business, until the feud of the two houses breaks into the street. Then the Prince comes, and the orchestra gives him chords: dissonant, fortissimo, set against everything before them. They are the law of the city in sound, and every later fight breaks it. Take them away and the feud has nothing to offend.
The second scene is the Capulet ball, and the centre of it is the Dance of the Knights, the music of the Montagues and Capulets: a heavy dotted theme in E minor, carried by brass. It is not the music of violence. It is pomp, slow and weighted, a class showing itself to itself, and its weight is heard as menace. The feud lives here, in the dance of a ball, as much as in the street. The city performs its hatred as ceremony, and the score builds that figure where the play only implies it.
The ball is where the drama’s threads meet. Romeo and Juliet meet there, and there Tybalt recognises Romeo. None of it can be cut, because the love, the recognition and the quarrel that will kill Mercutio all begin at one party. A ballet must show its people as a public before it can show two of them alone, and the first act gives the public its full weight before it lets the lovers go.
Movement II
Juliet is introduced in three themes, and the three are a life in brief. The first is quick, a running scale and skip, a child at play. The second is lyrical and given to the flute. The third is grave. Over the ballet the grave music grows in her scenes, and by the end it is a person who has chosen. No word says that she has grown up; the change is in what her music has become.
Each person in the score is a way of moving. The Nurse lumbers. Mercutio capers in broken rhythms. Tybalt thrusts. Friar Laurence is heard in a chorale-like theme that hardly moves at all. That is the work’s first knowledge, and its form carries it: a ballet’s people are their motion, and the music for each is a gait before it is a tune. Played as opera, these people would speak; here they move, and the score is how they move.
The first act ends with the balcony scene and the Love Dance. The lovers leave the ball, and the pas de deux follows the dance of the whole city as its answer: two bodies separate themselves from the public. The love theme climbs in the strings and opens out. It is the score’s first summit of beauty, and the theme it raises will come back changed. The order is the drama’s argument. Love is first heard as a withdrawal from the dance that everyone else is dancing.
Movement III
The second act opens in the square at a folk festival, and spends long stretches on the town at play: street dances, a Dance with Mandolins, a Dance of the Five Couples. This is the loosest part of the score. Each of these numbers could be cut with a loss of colour and none of argument, and in the theatre they often are. About a fifth of the ballet is dance of this kind across its length. They obey the idiom but not the drama; they could stand in another ballet.
They are also the world against which the lovers are measured. Between them the act turns: in Friar Laurence’s cell the lovers are secretly married. Then the street again, and the fights. Mercutio, the jester, is killed, and dies while his music keeps joking. His capering rhythms go on and fail. Death arrives inside play, and the turn from comedy to tragedy is made without a pause for it.
Romeo kills Tybalt, and the score gives his death hammered tutti blows, repeated and even, the sublime of terror with nothing to soften it. A procession follows to close the act. Here the feud that was ceremony at the ball becomes a corpse in the street, and the Prince’s law, given in chords at the start, is broken past repair. From this point the music of the city has nothing left to offer the lovers.
Movement IV
The third act is Juliet’s room. Romeo and Juliet part at dawn, and the farewell before parting is one of the score’s heights of tenderness. The Capulets press the marriage to Paris; Juliet goes to Friar Laurence, takes his remedy, and on the morning of the wedding is found as if dead. The family, the Nurse and the forced marriage make the private room public again, and the act is the house closing on her.
Here the themes begin to change. The music of the balcony returns at the bedside, and the music that was Juliet’s play has given way to the grave theme of a woman who has chosen. The transformation of themes is the score’s main instrument, and it is what the concert suites cannot keep: they are rearranged, and the order that carries the themes toward the tomb does not survive in them.
The epilogue is short: Juliet’s funeral, and the deaths. The love theme comes back as an elegy, its notes little changed, so that what was heard at the balcony as love is heard at the tomb as death. Love and death are made one music, and the work builds that figure rather than borrowing it. The two most distant things in the ballet, the Nurse’s gait and Juliet’s death, are governed by one law: every person is a theme bound to a way of moving, and the tragedy is the passage of those themes from the ballroom to the grave.
Movement V
Prokofiev wrote the score in 1935 for the Kirov in Leningrad by first plan and then under contract to the Bolshoi, to a scenario after Shakespeare by Sergei Radlov, Adrian Piotrovsky, Leonid Lavrovsky and himself. That first version ended happily: Romeo arrives in time and Juliet wakes alive. Prokofiev is reported to have reasoned, in substance, that the living can dance and the dead cannot. The tragic ending was restored before the first staging, after objection. The Bolshoi declined to stage it and judged the score undanceable; in 1936 Pravda attacked Shostakovich.
Before the ballet reached a stage the music reached the concert hall: two orchestral suites in 1936, Op. 64bis and Op. 64ter, and the Ten Pieces for piano, Op. 75, in 1937; a third suite, Op. 101, followed in 1946. The ballet was first staged at Brno, in Czechoslovakia, on 30 December 1938, with choreography by Ivo Váňa Psota. The first Soviet staging was at the Kirov on 11 January 1940, choreographed by Lavrovsky, with Galina Ulanova as Juliet. The score as performed descends from that staging. The text of 1940 differs from that of 1935, and how far each change was the composer’s own is contested.
Since then the score has been answered by Ashton in Copenhagen, Cranko in Stuttgart, MacMillan at the Royal Ballet, Nureyev, Grigorovich, Neumeier and Maillot, and the Western narrative ballet of Cranko and MacMillan was built on it. It is in the repertory of nearly every large company. The dancers who called it undanceable were answered by every generation that danced it. Against The Rite of Spring it is a turn toward lyric simplicity on a road already opened, and the disclosure is largely its source’s; what the score knows, and no other form could know, is that two people can be seen to love by leaving a dance.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test meets resistance in the drama’s spine and finds give in the dances. The Prince’s dissonant chords must stand, because they are the law the feud breaks. The ball is required, since Romeo, Juliet and Tybalt’s recognition meet there; the fights are required, since Mercutio’s death turns comedy to tragedy; the epilogue is the whole of the ending. The give is in about a fifth of the score, dance for its own sake: the Dance of the Five Couples, the Dance with Mandolins, the street festival, the Morning Serenade, the Dance of the Girls with Lilies. Each could go with a loss of colour, not of argument. The town at play is the world the lovers stand outside, which keeps the axis from falling lower.
Score: 8.1 / 10
Disclosure through sound is credited fully, and what it discloses can be stated. A girl’s becoming a woman is heard as a change in her themes: the first, a running scale and skip, is a child at play; the grave theme that grows in her scenes is a person who has chosen. Collective hatred is disclosed as ceremony: the Montague and Capulet music is not violence but pomp, a heavy dotted rhythm in E minor for brass, a class showing itself to itself. And death arrives inside play, as Mercutio dies while his music keeps joking. Held below the gate because the condition is largely Shakespeare’s, the score adds little the play does not state, and much of it is portraiture, the Nurse and the friar, rather than disclosure.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Height is reached often, and at both ends of the axis. The sublime of terror: the Prince’s chords, and the hammered tutti blows of Tybalt’s death with the procession after it at the close of the second act. Grandeur in dread: the Montagues and Capulets, whose weight is felt as menace. The sublime of beauty: the balcony scene and the Love Dance closing the first act, the love theme climbing in the strings; the farewell before parting; Juliet’s lyrical theme for flute. The sublime of grief: her funeral and her death. Ten or more numbers rise. Held below Otello’s 9.4 because a fifth of the score is charm by design, and because some climaxes are reached by repetition and volume more than by growth.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The archetype is inherited, and an adaptation is neither capped by its source nor credited for it: the question is whether the score builds it. It does, twice. Love and death are made one music: the themes of the balcony return, transformed, at the bedside and at the tomb, so that the love theme is heard at the end as a death theme with its notes little changed. And the feud is built as a ritual of the city: the knights’ dance is the polis performing its own hatred, a figure the work constructs rather than borrows. The particulars stay particular: a nurse who waddles, a friar’s chorale, mandolins in the street. Held at the gate because the frame is Shakespeare’s, and without words the lovers’ imagery of night and day cannot become the score’s own.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The inheritance is the full-length narrative ballet of Petipa and Tchaikovsky and, in Soviet ballet, the new dram-ballet of Asafyev’s The Fountain of Bakhchisarai (1934). The departures: a Shakespearean tragedy as a full-length ballet; a score built as continuous symphonic drama with leading themes, not as numbers for variations; dissonance and abrupt harmonic side-steps in a lyrical idiom. The stake was real: the Bolshoi refused it, the dancers called it undanceable, and 1936 was the year of Pravda’s attack on Shostakovich. Held below the gate because much of the turn runs along a road already opened by Tchaikovsky’s symphonic ballet and the dram-ballet’s programme, and because, against Prokofiev’s earlier ballets and Stravinsky’s, it is a turn toward lyric simplicity.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Change the form and the work loses part of what it knows, which is character as motion. Each person is a way of moving set to music: Juliet’s running scales, the Nurse’s lumbering gait, Mercutio’s capering and broken rhythms, Tybalt’s thrust, the friar’s stillness. The ballet’s form, a public of dancers out of which two bodies separate themselves, is the instrument of the drama’s knowledge that love is a withdrawal from the dance of the city: the balcony pas de deux follows the ball. Recast as opera, the lovers would speak; as a concert suite, the order goes. Held below the top by the work’s own life, since the suites carry large parts of it into the concert hall and lose little force there, and by divertissements that are form as the genre’s habit.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Evidence, not promise, and largely of choreography. The score has been answered by the choreographers of each generation: Lavrovsky (1940, filmed in 1955 with Ulanova), Ashton (Copenhagen, 1955), Cranko (Stuttgart, 1962), MacMillan (the Royal Ballet, 1965), Nureyev (1977), Grigorovich, Neumeier and Maillot (1996), each finding a different drama in the same music. The open questions are real: what the happy ending of 1935 says of Soviet art in that year; how far the text of 1940 is the composer’s own, which is contested; whether the knights’ music is satire or celebration. Held below the elder music because the musical literature is thinner than the choreographic, and the yield on return is more of beauty than of argument.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The field is ballet and orchestral music of the 1930s, with Stravinsky’s Perséphone and Jeu de cartes and the Soviet dram-ballet beside it. The intrinsic force is real: the work made the full-length ballet a symphonic tragedy carried by leading themes, and showed that a large narrative score could be modern in harmony and lyrical at once. It reorganised the narrative ballet more than it reorganised music. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the score set the model for Soviet narrative ballet, and it became the score on which the Western narrative ballet of Cranko and MacMillan was built. The figure is discounted because the reach runs more within ballet than across the art of composition.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Survival is weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, over nearly ninety years since the first staging. Presence is among the widest of any score of its century: in the repertory of nearly every large ballet company, in a dozen choreographies; the suites in the concert hall since 1936; the Montagues and Capulets known far outside music. Popularity is presence, not proof, and earns at most a tenth. Form is where the charge falls. There is no single settled text: the version of 1935, the version of 1940, and productions that cut and reorder. The tragic score survives whole and legible, so the charge is small, but it offsets the presence credit, and the figure stands at the usual mark for its span, level with Otello.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Command of the medium bears weight throughout. Melody first: the love theme, Juliet’s three themes, the friar’s chorale, each memorable and each built to change. Harmony: diatonic lines turned by sudden side-steps to remote chords, so that a plain tune is made strange by one bar. Orchestration as drama: colour bound to persons and places, mandolins for the street, brass that weighs. And writing for dance: phrases a body can count that are still a symphonic texture. The costs are stated: the phrase structure is often square, built of four- and eight-bar units repeated; climaxes are sometimes reached by restatement at higher volume; some doubling is heavy. Below Otello at 9.5 and the Goldberg Variations at 9.7, where nothing falls short of its intention.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Take the two most distant elements, the Nurse’s comic gait and the death of Juliet. One law governs them. Every person and place is a theme bound to a way of moving, and the tragedy is the passage of those themes from the ballroom and the street to the tomb, where they are transformed; the same idiom, a diatonic melody bent by side-steps, holds the comedy and the grief. The law holds most firmly in the thread of Juliet and the lovers, which runs from her first entrance to the last bars. The strain is the divertissement: the Dance with Mandolins, the Five Couples and the Lilies obey the idiom but not the drama’s law, and could stand in another ballet. The range governed is wide, from farce to funeral; the slack is in the middle of the second act.
Score: 8.6 / 10
A full-length ballet holds more orders than a quartet, and the drama integrates them: the self, in Juliet’s growth and Romeo’s change; the family, in the Capulet parents, the Nurse and the forced marriage to Paris; the state, in the Prince and his order; class, in the knights’ ceremony against the street’s folk dancing; the crowd, at the festival; the sacred, in the friar’s cell and the secret marriage; mortality, in three deaths and a tomb. They are held together: the Prince’s law is broken in the street where the folk dance, and the family’s ball is where love begins. What holds the axis at its figure, the lowest of the twelve, is absence and means: labour, history and the natural order barely appear, and wordless dance renders the state and the church as figures, not as structures.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.6 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Made at 9.2, then The Sublime and The Imperishable at 9.0. Melody built to change, plain tunes made strange by one harmonic side-step, and writing a body can count that still sounds as symphony; height reached in ten or more numbers, from the Prince’s chords to the tomb; and a presence among the widest of any score of its century, with the tragic score whole and legible.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 8.0: many orders held by the drama, but labour, history and the natural order barely present, and the state and the church rendered as figures, not structures. Next, The Inevitable at 8.1, for about a fifth of the score given to dance for its own sake. Then The Unconcealment and The Swerve at 8.3: a disclosure largely Shakespeare’s, and a turn toward lyric simplicity along a road Tchaikovsky and the dram-ballet had opened.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.1 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Made at 9.2, The Living Form at 8.6, The Inner Law at 8.6, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 9.0 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, and The Archetypal Deep meets it exactly at 8.5, but The Unconcealment at 8.3 and The Swerve at 8.3 fall short by two tenths. The Universal Minimum is met: of the eleven axes it covers, none falls below 8.1, against 7.5. The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.0. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The aggregate, 8.6, stands in the band of Tier IV and below the 9.0 the summit requires in any case.
Basis · the full ballet score of Romeo and Juliet, Op. 64, and its stage and concert tradition, read from knowledge under the desk’s convention for concert music; no score, recording or text was in hand. The unit is the score in the standard performing version that descends from the Kirov staging of 1940: four acts, the last a short epilogue, with the tragic ending, scored as one work. The version of 1935 with its happy ending, the three orchestral suites (Op. 64bis and Op. 64ter, 1936; Op. 101, 1946) and the Ten Pieces for piano, Op. 75 (1937), are evidence for survival and reach, not the object; no choreography is the unit, and what a choreographer makes of the score is evidence only. There are no words; titles of numbers are given as known, and nothing is quoted. The span since composition and since the first stagings was computed by script. Figures that could not be verified, among them the count and numbering of the numbers, the running time, the full list of the orchestra’s instruments, the date the orchestration was finished, the detail of the changes made for the staging of 1940, the fate of the scenario’s authors, later reconstructions of the 1935 version and the score’s later influence beyond ballet, are not given. The sound of the work as heard is beyond this reading and is neither credited nor charged.